Plans for an £50 million ($80m) Earthquake early warning system for California have been unveiled.

The ShakeAlert system, which has taken ten years to develop, would give a minute's warning of a major quake.

Experts say this would give residents critical time for residents to 'duck and cover' and for utilities to power down.

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A simulation of a major earthquake along the an Andreas Fault, from the Salton Sea to downtown Los Angeles. Researchers today launched a bill for $80m of funding for an early warning system for the whole of Californai, which would use 2,000 sensors already in place to look for waves that signal the start of a fault line rupturing.

HOW SOPHISTICATED SHAKEALERT COULD SAVE LIVES

The system is based on a
highly sophisticated algorithm that can send out a signal from any one
of the 2,000 quake-detecting instruments already in place up and down the
state.

An alert would go out whenever the system senses a temblor's
first pulse of short shock waves - known as P waves - that speed through
the ground just as a seismic fault starts to rupture.

Those waves cause no damage, but they
are followed by the longer and more destructive pulses known as S-waves.

The ShakeAlert system instantly predicts the quake's magnitude and also
calculates the time in seconds when the damaging shock waves will reach
any region in California where people are equipped to receive the
signal.

The warning time will depend on the distance between a quake's epicenter and
the location where the S-waves will arrive.

For
example, the researchers said, in one test of the ShakeAlert system last year, a
very small quake hit near the epicenter of the deadly 1989 Loma Prieta
temblor.

The system correctly predicted that its magnitude would be only
3.5 and warned San Francisco locations that its shock waves would reach
there exactly 25 seconds after the quake ruptured near Santa Cruz.

It uses a network of 2,000 quake-detecting instruments now in place up and down the state.

Its backers say it could
warn emergency workers and the public as much as a full minute before a
big quake ruptures the ground along any of the faults in the state.

There
is a 99 percent chance of a magnitude-6.7 earthquake or larger in the
next 30 years in California because of the number of fault lines in the
region, the biggest of which is the 810 mile San Andreas Fault that
forms the tectonic boundary between the Pacific Plate and the North
American Plate.

Using the
new system, an alert would go out whenever the system senses the first
pulse of short shock waves - known as P waves - that speed through the
ground just as a seismic fault starts to rupture.

California senator Alex Padilla, said
his bill, SB135, is based on recent advances in preparing the
California warning system to operate.

Padilla, an MIT-trained engineer from
the San Fernando Valley and a former space systems software specialist,
said it could provide 'critical seconds for teachers to get their
pupils to duck and cover, for drivers to pull to the side of the road,
for trains to stop, and for utilities to power down.'

The plans, unveiled at a news
conference at the California Institute of Technology, are have been
under development for a decade, and include studies of other early
warning systems in Japan, Mexico and other quake-prone nations.

Padilla estimated it would take $80 million to develop a statewide version of ShakeAlert through the California Emergency Management Agency, and $20 million more in annual operating
costs.

'But an investment like that is a no-brainer,' he said.

'If you think about the lives we can save, the injuries
we can reduce, and the billions upon billions of damages associated with
every large earthquake, the system would more than pay for itself.'

The researchers say the scheme is now ready.

'We're ready to build it up right now,' said Richard M. Allen, director of the UC
Berkeley Seismological Laboratory.

'It's ready for prime time.'

The system's test phases have proved
so successful that BART trains in San Francisco are already equipped to
stop instantly whenever the system flashes a hazard warning for the are,
Allen said.

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Lucy
Jones, senior adviser for risk reduction for the U.S. Geological Survey
(USGS), one of the monitoring network partners, said a lot of the
technology needed for the system is already in place.

'If we were building it from scratch, it would cost $650 million,' she said.

California State Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Los Angeles, reaches to point at a graphic describing how an earthquake warning system might work, as Dr. Douglas Given of the U.S. Geological Survey watches

The California area's probability of suffering an earthquake

It would take from one to three years to fully launch the new system, Jones said.

The system is based on a highly
sophisticated algorithm that can send out a signal from any one of the
2,000 quake-detecting instruments now in place up and down the state.

An alert would go out whenever the
system senses a temblor's first pulse of short shock waves - known as P
waves - that speed through the ground just as a seismic fault starts to
rupture.

CALIFORNIA - A STATE BLIGHTED BY EARTHQUAKES

California has suffered a number of
major earthquakes, with a 1906 quake reducing much of the centre of San
Francisco to rubble in what is
considered the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

The
subsequent fire that engulfed the city left more than 3,000 dead and
thousands more injured.

The Great Earthquake measured 7.9 on the Richter Scale as was felt as far away as Orgeon, Los Angeles and Nevada.

This photo provided by the Museum of Modern Art shows a stereo image of San Francisco City Hall made after the 1906 earthquake and fire that devastated the city.

Around 227,000 and 300,000 people were left homeless out of a population of about 410,000 and lead to refugee camps set up along the coast, which were still operational two years after the quake.

The cost of the damage from the earthquake was estimated at the time to be around $400million, which is around $9.5 billion in today’s money.

Aerial View of Los Angeles Freeway Damaged by Earthquake on January 17, 1994

Los Angeles has also been hit in recent years.

On January 17, 1994, the Northridge
earthquake hit Reseda, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, California,
lasting for about 10–20 seconds, causing major damage to building, and
freeways to collapse, with strong ground motion felt as far away as Las
Vegas, Nevada, about 220 miles (360 km) from the epicenter.

Earthquake damage in San Francisco on 18 Oct 1989, the day after the Loma Prieta earthquake. Researchers hope the new system could minise the loss of life from major California earthquakes in the future.

VIDEO Experience the heart stopping countdown of ShakeAlert system in action